reddit status update

On Sunday we relaunched with our new code. As we had mentioned previously, there isn’t a whole lot that is new to you. We want to get this new code nice and stable before we start adding new features to it.

The transition took much longer than expected, causing reddit.com to be frozen all day Sunday. We apologize for the downtime. We know how to avoid it in the future should something like this ever be necessary again, but hopefully that won’t ever be the case.

There are still a ton of outstanding bugs that we’re fixing as fast as we can. Stats and search are temporarily disabled, but will be coming back as soon as we can get them repaired.

One area that did receive new attention is the comment system. Many users dislike the “load more comments” links, and would like us to put things back to “they way they were.” Let me explain the way it was, and why we changed it:

In the old system, we displayed the first 100 comments regardless of quality (not counting the “collapsed” comments). The comments beyond the first 100 could be view by clicking “next” at the bottom. The issue with this is that often the top thread of conversation pushed most of the other comments beyond the “next” link, where they would often remain unread.

The way the new system works is we show the top 100 comments from the entire thread. This means good comments that used to be displayed behind the “next” link are now in the main listing. The “load more comments” links are effectively mini “next” links. The comments behind them have a lower score than the other 100 comments currently being displayed.

The reason we didn’t display more than 100 comments in the past and still don’t display more than 100 now is because of bandwidth and rendering time (both ours and yours).

We haven’t had much of a chance to really play with the new comment system as users ourselves. Give us some time to fix the outstanding bugs, and we’ll keep evaluating the new stuff. Keep in mind, we are reddit users ourselves and want the site to work as well as possible just as you all do.